Study of Strongly Correlated Electron Materials by Electron Microscopy
Department of Materials Science, Osaka Prefecture University
Abstract: Complex electronic oxides such as manganites with charge, spin and orbital (lattice) degrees of freedom have been studied extensively so far because of their unusual physical properties such as colossal magnetoresistance (CMR) effect and metal-insulator transition accompanying with the charge/orbital ordered (CO/OO) structures. Here overall structural features about CO/OO and magnetic microstructures associated with electronic phase separations, which are regarded as one of the important factors to grasp their unusual physical properties, are reviewed. In particular, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) studies are focused on in this article, including electron diffraction, high-resolution TEM, Lorentz TEM and electron small-angle scattering experiments.
Key words: transmission electron microscopy, Lorentz TEM, manganites, charge/orbital order, magnetic domains